Book Review: Mississippi Heroes: White Champions of Racial Justice, 1954-1974 by Charles Dollar

Issue 141 Book Review

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Reviewed by Walter B. Shurden

No kidding! I have waited one half-century for this book! My fear was that it would never find an author. After meeting Charles Dollar in 2014 at a Baptist Heritage conference, I read much of the manuscript. I knew that fortune had smiled on the subject and found its writer. Charles Dollar’s patient, passionate unpacking of an unknown and untold story begged for his talents. I cheered often and enthusiastically for the finish of the book.

The title describes exactly Dollar’s purpose. It is the history of White Mississippians, 59 of them, who championed racial justice during explosive and revolutionary years. Read that sentence again. White! Mississippians! Champions of racial justice! 1954-1974!

Dollar’s opening sentences set the stage for his book: “Between 1954-1974 hundreds of courageous Black individuals in Mississippi defied intimidation, police arrests, violence, and death to gain justice and equality in the courts, in education, job opportunities, and the right to vote. A very small minority of White Mississippians supported their efforts by championing racial justice and equality in the courts, in educational opportunity, in job opportunities, and the right to vote.”

Why 1954 to 1974? The date of Brown v. Board of Education decision issued by the Supreme Court of the United States that ruled that segregation in public schools violated the national Constitution was in 1954; the historic. 1974 is the date when Governor William Waller vetoed a bill funding the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an organization created by the state legislature in 1956 that worked to block desegregation of public schools. These dates by no means marked the beginning or the ending of the struggle for racial justice in Mississippi. However, these were 20 years of extreme racial turbulence in the state, in the middle of which was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Historical work has at least two sides to it: science and art or research and literature. Historians have less trouble researching names and dates. Sometimes the good ones even get lucky, connect all the dots, and describe helpfully the meaning of history. But the very best have enormous difficulty describing for their readers the raw, piercing emotions, the thick tension, the boiling anger, and the sharp pangs of fear of days gone by. Making emotions of the past come alive is as much art as science. Dollar does both well.

Jerry Ashby and I were standing on the steps of the cafeteria at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary one Monday afternoon in the early 1960s. Each had just returned from our weekend churches, his in Mississippi and mine in Louisiana. We were discussing the incendiary nature of the race issue in the country, especially in the South. I think I remember his exact words because they were so true of the times. Jerry Ashby said: “It has gotten so bad at my church, Shurden, that if you preach on John 3:16, their paranoia suspects you are a liberal on the race issue.” This is something of the inflammatory context in which the 59 White Mississippians lived and worked.

How did Charles Dollar get to 59? He culled the list to 100 people by reading “contemporary newspaper articles, and magazine reports, relevant journal articles and books.” Out of the 100 he found 59 that shared five characteristics. They were (1) permanent residents of Mississippi, (2) public and visible in their support of racial justice, (3) their visibility is documented by word or deed, (4) their visibility was sustained over time, and (5) they have a life story with adequate documentation.

Dollar arranged his heroes into seven categories: attorneys, business people, clergy, educators, media personalities, politicians and female activists. The clergy claimed 17 names, the most of any of the clusters.

Maybe the most helpful feature of Mississippi Heroes is Dollar’s use of brief vignettes to describe his subjects. The longest biographies never extended beyond six pages. Brevity encouraged readability, providing inspiration to read of yet another champion. One can scan the Table of Contents, spot a person or category of interest, and go immediately to the relevant pages. Or one can thumb through the volume randomly, reading according to interests and always finding unmistakable courage.

While brief, these mini essays are well researched and thoroughly documented. Citations, consisting of oral interviews as well as diverse written materials, offer broad direction for further historical investigation. Dollar has opened the door for eager graduate students and their hopeful dissertations of various kinds.

Dollar worked on his book for 11 years, from 2014 to 2025. He plowed lots of new ground. Many of his champions are completely unknown to Mississippians and, I am confident, even to their historians. A native Mississippian, I was a college student at Mississippi College and a seminary student at New Orleans from 1954 to 1967, years of Dollar’s concern.

I knew only one of Dollar’s heroes well, Richard Butler Smith, a dear seminary friend, my senior by several years. Four of the heroes hailed from my hometown of Greenville. Two of them, William Leon Higgs and Hodding Carter III, were my high school classmates. One could have guessed that Hodding would have landed in such a book. His father, Hodding Carter II, also in the book, earned the disdain of many Greenvillians with his edgy editorials on racial justice. Billy Higgs, an intellectual at Greenville High, operated a snow cone stand on Main Street during the hot Delta summers. As far as I know, no one ever expected he would one day be called a champion of racial justice. A graduate of Ole Miss and Harvard Law, Higgs was Charles Dollar’s first biographical entry and one of the most irrepressible White activists in Mississippi.

Baptist readers of age will recognize the name of Owen Cooper, a layman who was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1972. Cooper’s bio is reflective of most of these champions. Like Amos of Hebrew scripture, they were not born prophets or the children of prophets. They evolved. Some moved across the ethical spectrum more quickly and more energetically than others. But they all progressed. From initially accepting Mississippi’s cultural norms of racial prejudice to eventually questioning those norms, these 59 ultimately modified or rejected those norms in very public ways.

And what launched the moral transformations in their lives? Reading these 59 biographies, four creative forces stand out: education, good friends and mentors, religion and a basic instinct for fair play. Winifred Anne Green grew up in Jackson. A privileged white Mississippian, she reflected these forces in her life. And when her bewildered mother asked, “What did I do wrong? I tried so hard with you. We’ve educated you at the best school. What did I do wrong?” Winifred said, “You taught me the song that ‘red and yellow, Black and White are precious in his sight.’”

I was glad to note four Baptist clergy who also taught that song earned a place in Dollar’s book. They were William Penn Davis, an executive in the Mississippi Baptist Convention, Chester Molphus, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Belzoni, J. Ralph Noonkester, president of William Carey College, and R. B. Smith, mentioned above.

Dollar’s challenging accounts of integrity and bravery kindle curiosity, stimulate questions, whet the mind regarding the origins of moral courage, and help to preserve a slice of untold Mississippi history. He reminds us that the more public prophets never monopolized the hunger for racial justice in the Magnolia State. And while always in a supporting role to Black activists and never sacrificing nearly as much, these 59 worked for racial harmony.

Standing up and speaking out obviously came with a price, a recurring theme in this excellent and important book. Careers crumbled, friends and families fractured, and parents and children were alienated. Some, like the Reverend William Penn Davis, experienced heinous humiliation. One night a band of mask-wearing White men forced his car off the road, jerked him out, beat him and urinated in his face. They wanted “to teach a damn n-lover some sense.” And why? Because Davis was trying to train Christian leaders in Black churches.

Every state in the South, maybe in the nation, needs to find a Charles Dollar for a state history of this type. A minority of White “heroes” existed in all the Southern states. They were by no means “saviors,” but they knew right from wrong. Their stories, though minority ones in the struggle for human dignity, deserve the light of history.

Above, I said that I cheered often and enthusiastically for the finish of the book. I had good reasons. Charles Dollar was 80-years-old when he began his research. He published at age 91. We ought all to stand and cheer!

This book is not only significant because of its concern for racial justice. It is a stunning rebuke of ageism. A “senile old man” did not write this book. A professionally educated historian with a B.A from Union University, a B.D from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky performed the hard labor here.

If you want to know more about why Charles Dollar wrote this book, go to charlesdollarbooks.com. There you will also see his stellar qualifications as a historian and the many kudos that have accompanied his valuable work. Amazon has the book.

Walter “Buddy” Shurden is Minister at Large at Mercer University and is a frequent contributor to Christian Ethics Today.

Mississippi Heros